AIBU No going back to school I’m furious.

It has been reported this morning that seven hundred thousand children have not been able to access online learning at home throughout this crisis for any number of reasons.

The answer to that problem is to get the Schools fully open so all children can have equality in access to education.

Partly because the government failed to provide the laptops they promised for children from deprived backgrounds.

Galaxy

Partly because the government failed to provide the laptops they promised for children from deprived backgrounds.

Therefore Galaxy the answer is to get the schools fully open so relience on this very unreliable government is reduced.

In that the education establishment requires to become much more pro-active, rather than continuing with it's very negative attitude that we have witnessed yet again today.

Actually although for those 700000 children it is a real problem (and although they may not have on-line education that does not mean they haven't had any education, some teachers have been delivering work to homes) There are currently 8.82 million children in education, which means that over 8 million children have had some on-line education, which given the lack of government support at all levels is pretty good.

My experience of teaching staff is completely different to yours, but I have only spent 20 years working in partnership with schools, and currently have a son attending primary school, I am sure your experience is far more extensive grandad.

Many have found that much of the online learning the education "establishment" has put out is total cr*p, irregular and extremely variable in amounts from school to school.

The answer is to get the schools fully open across the country so educational standards can be restored once more.

In that positivity rather than negativity is required.

Grandad1943 Can I come into your place of work next week, dump all your paperwork, destroy all your computer files, move all your clients to new addresses, and then ask you to provide a service to your customers? I bet it wouldn't be much good. That's much the same as what happened in schools. Oh and I forgot could you as well put together some sort of assessments for some of your customers without any guidelines or standards about how to do that?

How can schools open when offices can't? It's just ridiculous to keep repeating the same statement.

trisher my understanding is that the risk to children is very low indeed of having serious problems from Covid, it's more that they could carry the virus home where there may be vulnerable family members.

Yeah! Open the schools fully - why not? How many dead staff and members of pupils' families would be a "positive" result?

I'd stick to what you're familiar with, if I were you Grandad.

So if the online output varies from school to school why wouldn't the on site education not vary from school to school.
It's actually not about positivity it's about careful consideration of managing risk. So for example I have read carefully the plan and risk assessment my sons school has produced and I feel confident they have weighed the needs of the children academically with the needs to manage risk. They have done this by gradual re introduction of children. I am therefore confident in my son returning to school as I have confidence in their knowledge, experience and skills. If on the other hand they had decided to open the school to all with some vague nonsense about volunteers supervising children then I would not sending my child back.

Galaxy I'm sure it's more extensive than mine too. I only spent 30 years in a classroom and a number of years assisting with writing the timetable and organising cover for absent staff and room changes on a daily basis for a secondary school with just over 2000 pupils. But what do I know?

Positivity without any analysis of what might work is what has got us into this mess. It's the governments message and it has been disastrous.

Grandad1943

It has been reported this morning that seven hundred thousand children have not been able to access online learning at home throughout this crisis for any number of reasons.

The answer to that problem is to get the Schools fully open so all children can have equality in access to education.

What makes you think all children have equality in access to education? You don’t know much about the education system if you think that just herding all children into classrooms equals any kind of equality of access.

humptydumpty the risk to most children is small but every school has children with health conditions such as asthma. Some children are recovering from life threatening conditions. I taught a little girl who was awaiting a heart operation. These children need to be protected as well as the staff. It's a question of looking at all the risks and working out a solution and that will be different for each school. The concept that teachers don't want to do it is completely false, they just want to do it properly.

Grandad you seem to have a real problem with the whole of the schools educational establishment.
I know you expressed unhappiness because a member of your family has had his education interrupted by this virus and, of course, he won't be the only one.

However, I doubt there are many teachers who have been sitting at home doing nothing or sending out crap in the way of online learning resources.
Why would they not want to do the very best for their students in these very difficult circumstances?

As I understand it, those students who were due to take their GCSEs and A levels may have covered much of the course work already so teachers are in a difficult position with those year groups. The examinations would be the culmination under exam conditions which is not possible at this time.

If they set extra assigments instead those would not be completed under exam conditions and would not give a true picture of achievement.

Of course there will always be some students who claim not to have been given any assigments to do or that the work they are supposed to do is crap.
It's a get-out clause, especially used by teenagers.

I think Grandad1943 should tour the country, addressing his opinions on the management of schools in this virus situation directly to small groups of children, using his habitual phraseology and precision of detail.

They would be 2 metres apart, of course, and while assembling for the talk they would be routed carefully round the school to avoid meeting any other groups coming to the lecture or departing after it. While walking along corridors, they would all wear masks, as they would be closer to one another than 2 metres.An adult would escort them to make sure that the masks stayed on, and no-one was horsing about with excitement at the prospect of being lectured by an outsider adult. All chairs in the lecture room would be disinfected between groups, as would door handles, door edges and frames, and the floor swabbed. The corridor would be swabbed regularly too.

If the children were expected to take notes, or fill in worksheets to show that they had understood and remembered the points made, they would have to bring their own pencils with them, and the worksheets collected (by a pupil wearing a mask?) and returned to him so that he could correct them before the next batch of children arrived.

If anyone seemed to be confused, he would have to see that child individually face-to-face (both wearing masks) and explain again, asking appropriate questions to trigger the child into working out for him/herself why he had advocated certain modes of behaviour. After each individual interview, he would have to wash his hands (yet again) and possibly change the mask.

Meanwhile, the normal teacher of that class is policing the next batch as they assemble for a repeat of the selfsame march to the lecture, each wearing a mask, correctly adjusted, and carrying the right worksheet and their very own pencil (sharpened for the occasion)

Multiply this for each group studying each subject in each year that has returned to school. Multiply again for the number of times the teacher has to explain a detail individually to a child who hasn't quite caught a point, or who was thinking about something else at an important stage of the lesson. Multiply again for random interruptions. In a primary school, the pupils are more likely to stay in one room with the same teacher, but in a secondary school, moement between subjects is more likely.

School is not an office. Children of any age are not adult workers. Having been to school in childhood is not a qualification for knowing all about how schools operate.

Unfortunately there are two flaws in that scenario, Elegran

There are more than one or two very attentive children, eager to learn, who put up their hands wanting to ask questions all the way through. Unfortunately, no-one can understand what they're asking because the masks make them mumble.
One of the four year olds in fact wanted to be excused to go to the lavatory but she is now crying because no-one could understand her mumbling and she has wet herself.

And the cleaner hasn't come in because he or she has a shielding relative.

I am not re-entering the discussion about teachers themselves as my experience has always been in the private sector. I am, however, interested, in logistics and in finding ways to make things happen. It did occur to me there must be lots of industries/companies just sitting there waiting for schools to approach them for help in different areas. If the F1 racing teams and Dyson can make ventilators for the NHS, if schools themselves can make visors on their printers, then why shouldn't other industries come up with practical solutions to help schools return? Have schools tried approaching local businesses or is there a territorial issue here?
Leave the teaching to the teachers, but they can't be expected to redesign their work space with all the health and safety issues involved. I assume that is where Grandad is sort of coming from. Why the reluctance?

More total negativity. Your post above post Elegran almost brought me to tears. ?

However, could please answer a question that I have asked a number of times in this thread Elegran and no one from the declared education establishment on this forum seems prepared to give answer too.

That question is, if in September the Covid-19 situation throughout Britain is no different to the situation as of present would you propose that the schools remain closed indefinitely??????

Because he has consistently demonstrated his lack of understanding of child development, safeguarding, and children.

No one is proposing that grandad, every school I know us open.

12rg12ja I think you have hit the nail on the head there. Too many people consider school as childcare. It isn't meant to be a place to look after your children, it's where they learn. If parents want childcare, they can pay for it.

Nevermind September, why aren't we trialling solutions now? There's still another four or five weeks left of term time to get things up and running for more pupils. The wait and see approach isn't working.

Why wouldn't parents work while their children are at school?
It would be crazy to pay for a childminder to do nothing.